December 16, 2008

Jeremy Clarkson – The End Of Days

I was in Dublin last weekend, and had a very real sense I’d been invited to the last days of the Roman empire. As far as I could work out, everyone had a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a coat made from something that’s now extinct. And then there were the women. Wow. Not that long ago every girl on the Emerald Isle had a face the colour of straw and orange hair. Now it’s the other way around.

Everyone appeared to be drunk on naked hedonism. I’ve never seen so much jus being drizzled onto so many improbable things, none of which was potted herring. It was like Barcelona but with beer. And as I careered from bar to bar all I could think was: “Jesus. Can’t they see what’s coming?”

Ireland is tiny. Its population is smaller than New Zealand’s, so how could the Irish ever have generated the cash for so many trips to the hairdressers, so many lobsters and so many Rollers? And how, now, as they become the first country in Europe to go officially into recession, can they not see the financial meteorite coming? Why are they not all at home, singing mournful songs?

It’s the same story on this side of the Irish Sea, of course. We’re all still plunging hither and thither, guzzling wine and wondering what preposterously expensive electronic toys the children will want to smash on Christmas morning this year. We can’t see the meteorite coming either.

I think mainly this is because the government is not telling us the truth. It’s painting Gordon Brown as a global economic messiah and fiddling about with Vat, pretending that the coming recession will be bad. But that it can deal with it.

I don’t think it can. I have spoken to a couple of pretty senior bankers in the past couple of weeks and their story is rather different. They don’t refer to the looming problems as being like 1992 or even 1929. They talk about a total financial meltdown. They talk about the End of Days.

Already we are seeing household names disappearing from the high street and with them will go the suppliers whose names have only ever been visible behind the grime on motorway vans. The job losses will mount. And mount. And mount. And as they climb, the bad debt will put even more pressure on the banks until every single one of them stutters and fails.

The European banks took one hell of a battering when things went wrong in America. Imagine, then, how life will be when the crisis arrives on this side of the Atlantic. Small wonder one City figure of my acquaintance ordered three safes for his London house just last week.

Of course, you may imagine the government will simply step in and nationalise everything, but to do that, it will have to borrow. And when every government is doing the same thing, there simply won’t be enough cash in the global pot. You can forget Iceland. From what I gather, Spain has had it. Along with Italy, Ireland and very possibly the UK.

It is impossible for someone who scored a U in his economics A-level to grapple with the consequences of all this but I’m told that in simple terms money will cease to function as a meaningful commodity. The binary dots and dashes that fuel the entire system will flicker and die. And without money there will be no business. No means of selling goods. No means of transporting them. No means of making them in the first place even. That’s why another friend of mine has recently sold his London house and bought somewhere in the country . . . with a kitchen garden.

These, as I see them, are the facts. Planet Earth thought it had £10. But it turns out we had only £2. Which means everyone must lose 80% of their wealth. And that’s going to be a problem if you were living on the breadline beforehand.

Eventually, of course, the system will reboot itself, but for a while there will be absolute chaos: riots, lynchings, starvation. It’ll be a world without power or fuel, and with no fuel there’s no way the modern agricultural system can be maintained. Which means there will be no food either. You might like to stop and think about that for a while.

I have, and as a result I can see the day when I will have to shoot some of my neighbours – maybe even David Cameron – as we fight for the last bar of Fry’s Turkish Delight in the smoking ruin that was Chipping Norton’s post office.

I believe the government knows this is a distinct possibility and that it might happen next year, and there is absolutely nothing it can do to stop Cameron getting both barrels from my Beretta. But instead of telling us straight, it calls the crisis the “credit crunch” to make it sound like a breakfast cereal and asks Alistair Darling to smile and big up Gordon when he’s being interviewed.

I can’t say I blame it, really. If an enormous meteorite was heading our way and the authorities knew it couldn’t be stopped or diverted, why bother telling anyone? Best to let us soldier on in the dark until it all goes dark for real.

On a more cheery note, Vauxhall has stopped making the Vectra, that dreary, designed-in-a-coffee-break Eurobox that no one wanted. In its place stands the new Insignia, which has been voted European car of the year for 2009.

This award is made by motoring journalists across Europe, and, with the best will in the world, the Swedes do not want the same thing from a car as the Greeks. That’s why they almost always get it wrong. Past winners have been the Talbot Horizon and the Renault 9.

They’ve got the Insignia even more wrong than usual because the absolutely last thing anyone wants right now, and I’m including in the list consumption, a severed artery and a massive shark bite, is a four-door saloon car with a bargain-basement badge.

Oh it’s not a bad car. It’s extremely good-looking, it appears to be very well made, it is spacious and the prices are reasonable. But set against that are seats that are far too hard, the visibility – you can’t see the corners of the car from the driver’s chair – and the solid, inescapable fact that the Ford Mondeo is a more joyful thing to drive.

In the past, none of this would have mattered. Fleet managers would have bought 100 of whichever was the cheapest, and Jenkins from Pots, Pans and Pyrex would have had no say in the matter. Those days, however, are gone. The travelling salesman is now an internet address, and the mini MPV has bopped the traditional saloon on the head. I cannot think of the question in today’s climate to which the answer is “A Vauxhall Insignia”. And I’m surprised my colleagues on the car of the year jury didn’t notice this as well.

Then I keep remembering the Renault 9 and I’m not surprised at all.

I feel, I really do, for the bosses at GM who’ve laboured so hard to make this car. It’s way better than the Vectra. It looks as though they were bothered. But asking their dealerships to sell such a thing in today’s world is a bit like asking men in the first world war trenches to charge the enemy’s machinegun nests with spears.

Right now, there are two paths you can go down. You can either adopt the Irish attitude to the impending catastrophe and party like it’s 1999. In which case you are better off ignoring the Vauxhall and buying a 24ft Donzi speedboat instead.

Or you can actually start to make some sensible preparations for the complete breakdown in society. In which case you don’t want a Vauxhall either. Better to spend the money on a pair of shotguns and an allotment.

David Davis: Phone Companies Should Give Public Tracking Data To Police For Free

‘Mobile phone firms have been accused of cashing in on crime and terror after charging the police £8.7million a year to access data tracking information. The companies keep records of the times, dates, duration of mobile phone calls and the numbers contacted but not the actual content of conversations.

Former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: ‘Companies should have a sense of civic responsibility and, in my view, that means this sort of material should be provided free.’

Gotcha! Left: Rachman at the 2003 Bilderberg Meeting in France; right: Rachman’s mug at his blog

‘“Rapporteur” Gideon Rachman wrote a piece for the Financial Times on Dec. 8th, 2008: “And Now For A World Government.” Let’s take a look.

“I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible.”

‘Perhaps you have never believed it, but the elite conclave to which you have been privy certainly have. You neglected to mention your previous attendance of the 2003 and 2004 Bilderberg meetings at Versailles, France, and Stresa, Italy, respectively.

You see, commoners – dubbed “useless eaters” – have been keeping tabs on the elite confab for 20+ years (call it grass-roots journalism). In 2003 and 2004, you were listed thus: GB – Rachman, Gideon – Brussels Correspondent, The Economist. Traditionally, “Rapporteurs” have been allowed to attend meetings such as these on condition of subservience and silence.

To the commoners who expect “rapporteurs” to do their job and “report”; it’s called “breach of trust” and collusion. To the “global governance” internationalists; it’s called “Chatham House Rules.”

‘The Pentagon has developed a comprehensive strategy for taking over the internet and controlling the free flow of information. The plan appears in a recently declassified document, “The Information Operations Roadmap”, which was provided under the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) and revealed in an article by the BBC. The Defense Dept. places a high-value on controlling information.

The new program illustrates their determination to establish the parameters of free speech.’

December 8, 2008

‘Remember your first kiss? Experiments in mice suggest that patterns of chemical “caps” on our DNA may be responsible for preserving such memories. To remember a particular event, a specific sequence of neurons must fire at just the right time. For this to happen, neurons must be connected in a certain way by chemical junctions called synapses. But how they last over decades, given that proteins in the brain, including those that form synapses, are destroyed and replaced constantly, is a mystery.’

‘The UFO phenomenon never existed in the former USSR, at least in the official records. There were numerous stories about unidentified flying objects which could be heard from susceptible individuals, but Soviet cosmonauts never said anything on the subject, although they had a lot to share.’

‘Do you think of yourself as an open-minded person? Would you consider yourself “normal” in your way of thinking? Do you realize that your thought process is a process? Do you ever question that process?Most people go about their “daily routine” without giving it much thought. Everything you see (live, TV, print material) as well as everything you hear (live, TV, radio) is your source of information that “programs” your mind.’

‘Do you think of yourself as an open-minded person? Would you consider yourself “normal” in your way of thinking? Do you realize that your thought process is a process? Do you ever question that process?Most people go about their “daily routine” without giving it much thought. Everything you see (live, TV, print material) as well as everything you hear (live, TV, radio) is your source of information that “programs” your mind.’

‘Our political and cultural “leaders” are accomplices in a plot to re-engineer humanity to serve the Judeo-Masonic central banking cartel. Wars, “terrorism,” depressions, political and social change, entertainment and fads are all contrived to gradually bring about an Orwellian police state. Many people have said this but last week, I learned of another “smoking gun.”